Australia's children must all be given a good educational opportunity

A child’s human right to education is recognised in many international treaties, the most important of which are the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966 and the Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989. Australia is a party to these treaties and has pledged to respect, protect and fulfil the rights contained in them.

The treaties make quite detailed provisions about the nature of the right to education. The international committees established under the treaties to assess performance have summarised these provisions into five basic commitments by states that have ratified the treaties, including Australia.

• Education must be available for all without discrimination.

• It must be accessible, either within safe physical distance or by correspondence or some other form of distance education.

• It must be affordable; in fact primary education must be free and once a country has succeeded in providing a free secondary education, fees can only be reimposed for very compelling reasons.

• Education must be acceptable, culturally and in other ways, to both students and their parents.

• And it must be adaptable so that it meets the different circumstances and changing needs of each individual student.

In 1999-2000 the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission undertook a National Inquiry into Rural and Remote Education. As Human Rights Commissioner at the time I was appointed by the Commission to conduct the Inquiry on its behalf with the assistance of six co-commissioners. The Inquiry evaluated the evidence it received against these five criteria.

The fundamental nature of education

Education is fundamental to the development of human potential and to full participation in a democratic society. Access to good quality education affects the rights to health, employment and participation in political and cultural life and the exercise of freedoms such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion and belief. That’s why it is recognised as a human right. It is a right to which every person is entitled without discrimination.

This core significance of education was the second reason the Commission chose rural and remote education as the subject of its Inquiry. Many country towns and regions in Australia are in crisis, confronted by globalisation and the social and economic changes it has brought and will still bring. In these circumstances school education in rural and remote Australia is central to rural well-being generally. It provides a way to understand what is happening in all sectors of rural and remote community life and is a focus for recommendations which, if implemented, may help country people to meet the many challenges they face with creative solutions for local conditions addressing local needs. We saw good education as essential if small towns and remote communities are to have a future.

The Inquiry looked into the availability and accessibility of primary and secondary schooling, its quality and the extent to which it included, in an acceptable way, Indigenous children, children with disabilities and children from minority language, religious and cultural backgrounds.

What we found

Our central finding was that many young Australians are unable to enjoy the right to education adequately or equally. Many are unable to enjoy it at all. We found strong evidence that rural and remote children are generally disadvantaged in comparison with their urban counterparts, with the rights of Indigenous children and children with disabilities most at risk of all. We concluded that many thousands of children have no effective access to secondary education whatsoever and that tens of thousands more receive inadequate secondary opportunities. We found that hundreds of children face difficulty even in accessing a basic level of primary education and that literacy and numeracy are real and perhaps growing problems in these parts of Australia.

• Rural and remote students are less likely to stay on at school after the compulsory years or to finish secondary school. The retention rates for Indigenous students are particularly low.

• Tertiary participation is also lower for rural and remote students. The imbalance is even worse for isolated students.

• There is evidence that rural and remote students have lower school participation generally, less consistent attendance and poorer performances.

• Parents and teachers said that often school transport was not available, that it did not guarantee a place for children in non-government schools or TAFE, that it rarely had temperature control and so was very hot in summer and very cold in winter and that it was often unsafe.

• We were told that specialist music, drama, art and language teachers were hard to find. But we were also told of difficulties in relation to maths and science teachers and, most surprisingly of all, the difficulty in finding an agriculture teacher in some of the richest agricultural areas of South Australia.

The consequences of this situation are stark. It divides our nation. It harms all Australians when some Australians are denied the opportunities and resources they need to achieve their full potential.

What we recommended

When it came to framing our 73 recommendations, we asked ourselves one question: what is necessary to ensure that, by the age of 18, each child in Australia has received the education he or she requires to participate to his or her full potential in the social, economic, political and cultural life of the community? We developed our recommendations with our eyes firmly fixed on the cost implications. We did not want to recommend some prohibitively expensive educational utopia that was incapable of realisation. We framed our recommendations not around what was the maximum or even the desirable but what was the bare minimum necessary for compliance with Australia’s human rights commitments.

A national strategy for rural and remote education

The Inquiry recommended a national strategy for rural and remote education with state and territory components. The strategy should include not only schools but also the necessary ancillary services, programs and policies, such as telecommunications, transport, subsidies and allowances to families and students, sporting and recreational facilities, teacher training and regional planning. The strategy should be prepared by the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs, which brings together all federal, state and territory ministers with direct responsibilities in these areas. The strategy should incorporate a whole-of-government approach at each level, ensuring, for example, the coordination of schooling, transport and information technology services, the provision of health and nutrition services so that children are well enough to learn, and so on. The strategy should also identify the necessary resources for its implementation and ensure that those resources are committed by all levels of government rather than becoming another political football or another example of buck-passing.

The strategy should also provide for greatly enhanced collaboration across school sectors. We visited many towns where there were both government and non-government (usually Catholic) schools. In most instances both were struggling to meet the needs of their students. Neither had the resources to offer the range of curriculum choice students wanted and needed and neither had the facilities students in cities take for granted. Yet there was rarely any cooperation between them to share resources or facilities.

The national strategy should provide for and encourage the development of local partnerships across all education sectors with local community and business participation. This has begun nationally in the cooperation between schools and TAFE in vocational education programs. These need to be supported and extended. But the kinds of partnerships needed in local communities will involve more than that.

Every child is entitled to an education that develops his or her personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential. Local inter-agency partnerships have the best chance of responding to each child’s needs. Local partnerships can also support teachers, especially those who are new to teaching or new to country life. They can develop local leaders and offer familiar role models to local children, and they can assist children into productive work within their own communities. But they must have enough funding, be given decision-making responsibilities and include all relevant groups, especially parents and the children themselves. They must be part of the national strategy so that they receive endorsement and support from all levels of government.

Will it be implemented: our second question

We posed a second question: are we as a national community prepared to do whatever is necessary to ensure adequate education for every child in rural and remote Australia? Our recommendations report was tabled in federal parliament last June, but there has been no comprehensive response from the federal government. Country Australians are anxious for an answer to that question. And they are not prepared to wait much longer.

As I visited regional, rural and remote parts of Australia throughout 1998, 1999 and 2000, I heard the concerns of country people. They told me many things, including their concerns about the additional cost of living generally and of petrol prices in particular outside the capital cities. But these issues were subordinate to their far deeper concerns about the education and prospects of their children and young people. Without exception, every community we visited expressed anxiety about whether children had access to the quality education they needed to ensure them a future, hopefully in their own town or region but, failing that, then outside it. They feared that their children were slipping further behind, that their educational opportunities were far less than those of city children, that as result their children could not compete with the skills and qualifications of city children and so they might not have a future as contributing members of the broader Australian community. They expect these issues to be addressed as a top priority, more important by far than a reduction of 1.5 cents in the price of a litre of petrol.

Last year the federal government responded to rural health needs with substantial commitments in the 2000-01 budget. There was little by way of additional funding or new program initiatives to meet rural education needs. This year, the government released its Innovations Statement. Again, there was little for rural education. If it can find $2.6 billion to reduce petrol prices, then it can find enough to ensure a good education for rural children and young people. With talk of recession in the air the Treasurer is telling us that the federal government does not have additional resources. If so, then it will have to postpone some other, less pressing area of expenditure, like the large increases in defence spending announced last year. Defence can wait; rural education cannot. Money spent on education is money well spent. It is investment in our nation’s future and in the future of our children.

The Opposition has no capacity to act at once but it can and must make firm promises. It speaks of its commitment to a Knowledge Nation but at this stage there is nothing specific to meet rural education needs. There has to be. Rural communities are looking for the detail, for the specifics of what the Opposition will do if elected. There will be electoral reward for a positive response and electoral punishment if these needs are ignored.

The reports of the Human Rights Commission’s National Inquiry into Rural and Remote Education provide a blueprint for the government and the opposition to develop new policies and programs and to find funds for a fairer deal for country children and young people. The many thousands of country people who contributed to those reports and others who share their views expect that blueprint to be endorsed and implemented.